Save time & money by sharing your portfolio with your accountant

Taxes are almost due for Australians. Despite our best intentions, wherever we live, most of us are not as organised as we’ve lead ourselves to believe.

Even though most investors use Sharesight throughout the financial year to keep their portfolios organised, we inevitably see a spike in activity around EOFY and tax time.

Regardless of how you use Sharesight, it is possible to ease the tax time crunch and save money on your accounting and bookkeeping bills.

The surefire way to do this is to get your accountant involved early. But if you’re reading this and checking the calendar, don’t worry! Sharesight will have already automated a portion of what accountants charge for anyhow.

Share portfolio access with your accountant

Your accountant will benefit from the same real-time access to the portfolio that you enjoy. Any trades you make or dividends you receive will appear for them too. This also means they can produce the reports they require because they’ll have access to your portfolio history as well.

Access to a portfolio can be withdrawn or modified to your liking. You can control whether or not the accountant can “read only”, or make edits. Furthermore, you can share one or multiple portfolios based on your needs. You’re in complete control.

Leverage professional-grade tax reports

You might be wondering whether Sharesight can provide all the information your accountant needs. Yes, in fact Sharesight is also used by hundreds of accounting firms and professional investors. Sharesight has 9 reports designed to make tax time easy.

Your accountant may also ask for a “valuation” report or a “snapshot” of your portfolio. The information they’re looking for can be found by using the Performance Report and choosing an end date at the financial year end. All data will be as at that historical date.

The Historical Cost report might also come in handy as it displays closing quantity and market value as at the date chosen.

The reports can be exported and the time periods can be customised, which gives your accountant a real time window into your portfolio, or a snapshot in time.

Prepare your portfolio for your accountant

The beauty of using Sharesight is that by its very nature, it’s collects all of the data your accountant requires (minus the hefty hourly fees!).

Sharesight tracks your trades, automatically populates dividends and most corporate actions so that it can calculate your performance. It also updates your portfolio every day so your return and valuation figures are up to date.

It’s always a good idea to double-check your data though. Below are a few tips on how to ensure your portfolio is accurate and ready for your accountant:

Work iteratively with your accountant

Think about it. How often have you been asked by your accountant to dump or upload a whole bunch of historical data only so they can reprocess it? This is time (and money) spent on recreating the past. The best accountants are the ones who help you plan for the future. By using Sharesight you’ve already done all the historical work for them!

By adding all of your investment data into Sharesight and sharing access, you’re already in terrific shape for this tax deadline, and not to mention next year’s.

We know that 70% of Sharesight clients previously relied on a spreadsheet to track their investments. Investors turn to Sharesight so they can accurately track their performance and to make doing their taxes easier - if you think about it, you can’t do one without the other.

So why not let your accountant benefit as well?

Share your thoughts on using Sharesight for tax prep

Please let us know how you use Sharesight for tax, or provide feedback on what we can improve by posting in our community forum.